Journey of a SafeWatch Report

SafeWatch is the cornerstone of our patient safety program—when you report something in SafeWatch, you are helping keep our patients safe. You can use SafeWatch to report events (where an issue reached a patient) as well as great catches (where an issue was caught before it reached a patient).

Each month, there are about 1,700 reports made through SafeWatch. Over a third of these are great catches.

What happens when you submit a SafeWatch report?

First, it’s routed to the right person. Employee injuries are sent to Employee Health, unprofessional provider conduct reports are sent to the medical staff, and patient safety events/great catches are sent to the SafeWatch reviewer for that location.

Every Carilion location is assigned a reviewer in SafeWatch. These are unit leaders who are automatically assigned to complete a review after you submit your report, asking the following three questions:

What caused the event or near miss?
What action was taken to prevent reoccurrence of the event or near miss? They look for solutions, not to place blame or punish anyone.
Was this a system or process issue? If yes, then they document whether the process issue was addressed or not.

Hundreds of reviewers across Carilion have received training in completing a review. The Clinical Advancement and Patient Safety (CAPS) team provides each unit with a monthly dashboard showing trends for reports on that unit. If you are unsure if your unit has a dashboard, contact the Quality and Patient Safety contact at your facility to have one built.

Patient safety specialists Erika Hamilton and Greg Brown

At the same time, a separate review is conducted by a patient safety specialist from the CAPS team. That means there are, at minimum, two different people looking at every patient safety report in SafeWatch.

We currently have two patient safety specialists at Carilion who review SafeWatch reports—Greg Brown and Erika Hamilton.

After reviewing each report, they determine whether it should be closed (if the location reviewer has made a change to prevent future events) or escalated (if additional collaboration is needed). They also can mark a report as a "great catch" and eligible for the Great Catch Award.

"Making a safer environment for our patients is awesome, but my favorite thing about my job is helping our heroes across Carilion," said Greg.

Patient safety specialists track our SafeWatch reports to look for trends and determine whether larger improvement initiatives are needed. While we can only implement a few of these large initiatives each year, even the small ones can make a difference for any one of our patients or employees.

Questions?

To learn more, vist the SafeWatch Reporting hub. If you have questions, ask your manager or the Quality and Patient Safety contact at your facility: